Encuesta Aplicada a los Usuarios del Servicio de Salud

“We don’t have to posit self-awareness, conscious thought, to have an organized network that responds to its environment and issues judgements about what its individual nodes should look like.” “Still sounds like the ghost in the machine to me…” Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio (1999) “As I keep reminding you, the material construction is irrelevant. It is complexity of organization that creates the possibility of a mind. …Every action that they take constitutes a ‘thought’ in the mind of the Galaxy.” Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Heaven (2004) In the last chapter, we finished elaborating the methodology with which a careful critic ought to approach a novel like Canticle. In order that a single, limited history does not take precedence over another, and for a truly complex reading of the history of science, it is essential that one acknowledge the many layers of history inherent in the novel. For that reason, we have considered Canticle in relation to the more popular history advanced by the discipline of the History of Science, then contrasted that with our own, marginal account of the Dark Ages. In examining the cognitive dissonance

occasioned by these three competing accounts, we discovered that religion acquires something of an upper hand, both in histories and literary criticism as well as philosophy. The steps of this method, for the most part, will not change in the present chapter.

We begin, in this chapter, with an examination of another means by which history is obscured, namely the notion of a system. Much the same as the last chapter, we follow Jameson’s statement about the confounding effect of a system on history in our

assessment. We then examine, in both Canticle and in the discipline of the History of Science, the way in which this notion of system limits the history of violence between religion and science during the so-called Scientific Revolution. In order to provide some contrast to these limited accounts, we then consider a case study of Johannes Kepler, an historical figure who is regularly painted as the epitome of science and religion

cooperating. This cooperation, the very notion of system or network that we shall explore in a moment, is not so apparent when one considers, as most historians do not, the many challenges posed to Kepler by religious authorities of his day. In this chapter, then, I shall again use Canticle as a starting point to elaborate the destructive effects that the notion of a system has on history in general and the history of science especially.

Systemic Infection

“System” or “network”; the notion is the same, whatever term one uses. In the last chapter we examined the historical implications of Miller’s terminology, and how that put him into a system with the History of Science. In this chapter we shall move away from epistemology, but not before examining the notion of a system in much more detail as well as the implications of Miller’s systematization. We are moving away from epistemology because Miller very seldom employs the terms “system” or “network,” whereas one notes in the epigraphs above that science fiction authors of the last ten years have employed them much more readily. As we found previously, Miller was among the avant garde of science fiction writers to approach history in the manner critics from the History of Science had employed since 1913. In my opinion, one might attribute the greater ease with these terms displayed by Greg Bear or Stewart and Cohen to the

popularity of such critics as Bruno Latour (as we also discussed previously). Whatever the reason, “system” is a concept much more accessible to today’s writer of science fiction. Thus, we shall begin this chapter by examining how, and perhaps why, science fiction writers have appropriated the idea of system or network.

“In the next stage of evolution, humans are history…” or so reads the dust jacket of Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio. It perhaps overstates the main topic of the book, which is a leap in evolution past Homo Sapiens, but does touch on the inhumanity of a system. To Bear, system expresses itself as something opposed to linear, or gradual, evolution. With the introduction of SHEVA, a virus hidden in humanity’s very molecular makeup that the characters conclude accounts for the genetic leap from Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens, Lamarckian evolution (what we typically think of as evolution from ape to human) is undone. Thus we find that that champion of gradualism, Richard “Dawkins is beside himself. I’ve been telling them for months that all that was needed was another link in the chain, and we’d have a feedback loop” (79). It is immediately interesting that Dawkins is such an outspoken atheist, but also that Bear assumes that the notion of system contradicts atheism because the former is a collective and the latter supposedly individualizing. The book goes on to describe a feedback loop as a “Complete circle of communication between individuals in a population” (ibid). Thus, the individual is a useful comparison to the system, but ultimately unimportant to the larger network.

Further comparison is made even to individual body parts, again calling attention to the parts we play as nodes in that system:

That’s the way the human brain works, or a species, or an ecosystem, for that matter. And it’s also the most basic definition of a thought. Neurons exchange lots of signals. The signals can add or subtract from each other, neutralize or

cooperate to reach a decision…Nerve cells are nodes in the brain, and genes are nodes in the genome, competing and cooperating to be reproduced in the next generation. Individuals are nodes in a species, and species are nodes in an ecosystem (84).

Kaye, the main character, is immediately nervous that creationists will claim they are “talking about God.” This anxiety is seconded by Mitch (see epigraph) later in the chapter. However, as these two characters have an evolved child together in an act of rebellion their attitudes seem to change. In fact, the novel appears to posit directly that it

is “talking about God” or attempting to find the “Ghost in the machine.” Another

character concludes to the approbation of even skeptical Mitch that “This DNA must be a spirit in us, the words our ancestors pass on, words of the Creator” (372).

Bear employs “system,” then, specifically to show God in the machine. What is the result of such a movement in the narration? Does it not have the immediate effect of blurring the boundaries between science and religion? If they are placed in the same system, they become simply “nodes” that communicate and offer one another feedback to their mutual benefit. In this consideration, the warfare model of the interaction of science and religion is entirely undone. It would not surprise the reader once again to find that violence in Bear’s novel is similar to that in Canticle as it is enacted by a mob of people who do not properly understand the situation. No proponent of science or religion acts against one of the opposite camp, except in the service of one of these mobs or of the State. Bear uses what is otherwise a scientific concept, especially using ecosystems and extrapolating, to recreate the complexity thesis.

System, in fact ecosystem, is even further embodied in the Stewart and Cohen novel, Heaven, where it takes the form of the sentient pond from the planet Aquifer. The

pond is found through accident as one of a fleeing race of polypoid’s (sentient squids) flees the soldiers of the Church of Cosmic Unity and “falls” into the oversized puddle. Second-Best Sailor discovers that this pond is an ancient form of life that has developed as a kind of sentient ecosystem. It uses flies for communication, fish for digestion, etc. More importantly, though, it is a foil for the “memeplex” of Cosmic Unity, a religious coalition that is also a system but one based on only two communistic principles

(memes). Pond contrasts with Cosmic Unity as “complexity” is contrasted to “warfare,” in fact this comparison is especially apt since Cosmic Unity militantly enforces equality among species. The novel makes clear that systematization is unavoidable, all are merely nodes, but that certain systems can become sick when they are not complex enough or they do not have feedback.

Indeed, becoming a part of a system is unavoidable in Heaven because, “You are not single, integrated machines. You are evolved organisms, built from innumerable components. Your bodies and your consciousnesses are distributed” (304). Even as Stewart and Cohen seem to criticize religion for its simplicity through the depiction of Cosmic Unity, they allow, like Miller, for more nondescript humanistic religion. Essentially, this too marries religion and science peacefully as the idea of

“consciousness” is extrapolated into that of the “galactic mind.” The pond plays the part of prophet, in this case, as it can empathically sense the presence of the galaxy itself, which in the novel is only a larger, more complex version of the pond. Like certain strands of chaos and complexity theory, in which pattern is found to repeat like the seashells of Second-Best Sailor’s home world and the swirl of the Milky Way, the idea of

galactic mind is the “cosmic” unification of science and religion—it is “God in the Machine.”

The two novels discussed so far are only a sample of the force with which the History of Science approach has metastasized in science fiction literature. It is quite obvious that the idea of “complexity” has become the standard approach when Heaven, which launches very rationalized criticisms against religion for the first 300 pages, still ends with the conflation of science and religion. It is telling that the notion of evolution figures so heavily into each of these recent accounts of systems (more complexity equals higher evolution), since conflating science with religion is precisely the approach taken by historians trying to reconcile with evolution. One may find the epitome of this approach to evolution in Mary Midgley’s work aptly titled Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears. In a move similar to Latour’s in The Pasteurization of France, Midgley attempts to demonstrate the similarity between evolution and religion in their creating a mythology and thereby indoctrinating adherents. Even in the person of Charles Darwin, then, she conflates science and religion as she says:

When the young Darwin immersed himself in the arguments about cosmic purpose in Paley’s theological textbook […] he was neither wasting his time nor distorting his scientific project [but] seriously working his way through a range of life-positions which lay on the route to the one he could finally use (4).

Midgley, Bear, Stewart and Cohen all essentially reiterate the ideas of Lindberg regarding the Middle Ages, now in the context of evolution, that science and religion are merely nodes in the same system, equally invested in the “quest for human knowledge.”

If we take these two novels, Darwin’s Radio and Heaven, as examples of

in science fiction in a manner very agreeable to the History of Science. Yet with regard to history, these novels speak mostly to evolution and so fall only on the fringes of the time period examined by Canticle’s second section. “Fiat Lux” examines that period sometimes known as the Scientific Revolution22 that many historians place between the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages and “modern science.” Again, it depends on what account you read. Some historians of science argue that “modern science” began with Isaac Newton23, while others would argue much earlier or later. If that is the case, Darwin falls outside the purview of this chapter (or at least is marginally late we assume some overlap of the time periods). Yet the idea of system, even in science fiction of the 21st Century, is dependent on earlier attempts to marry science and religion by such people as Pierre Duhem.

We already discussed in earlier chapters Canticle’s relationship to the ideas of continuity advanced by Duhem, that of the monks and the Memorabilia to Duhem’s 13th century Parisian contribution to the Scientific Revolution. Duhem and the Scientific Revolution are much more relevant to “Fiat Lux.” We may also find in Heaven, though, something akin to Duhem’s notion that the Condemnation of 1277 actually contributed to, rather than hindered, the Scientific Revolution. As disillusioned Servant of Unity Sam reflects on the atrocities he almost committed, the philosopher Epimenides exonerates him because his thoughts had too narrow, or simple, a context and because a “wider context may alter the whole picture.” And consider:

22

In capitals to distinguish the time period from those “revolutions in science” about which Kuhn wrote.

23

Though this is tenuous also, though, as Historians debunk his science too. That is, Newton has also been “systematized,” in a very similar way to Charles Darwin.For example, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs writes that, “to Newton himself all his diverse studies constituted a unified plan for obtaining Truth, and it is organized

“This is what makes imagination so powerful, Samuel. And unorthodoxy so dangerous.”

“But unorthodoxy leads to heresy,” said Sam.

Epimenides gave the originator of the Samuellian heresy a level stare. “Yes. That is what makes it so valuable” (333).

To rephrase this passage in Bear’s terms, religion provides a necessary communication with science in the form of a feedback loop, which religion terms heresy. In this conception of “system,” religion is necessary for the advancement of science and the challenges it provides are actually spurs to scientific development. Thus, through Duhem, we can connect Miller to science fiction written almost fifty years later.

More importantly, though, “system” becomes merely a euphemism for conflict, and one must again question the motives of historians who claim “complexity,”

especially in a period as tumultuous as the Scientific Revolution. Why must they obscure the violence that did truly exist? Can warfare, conflict, or violence not be complex? The two novels discussed above are not alternate histories, and so are not burdened with the historical actions of the religions they present. The lack of such historical violence, though, stands out as an oversight in works like Agamben’s as the concept of war is apparently beyond understanding. He says again of the concentration camps that without his own assessment of biopolitics, “the incredible things that happened there remain completely unintelligible” (170). Such actions, though, are much easier to understand when put in the context of war, drawing on the examples of atrocities committed in America’s own concentration camps in WWII or Vietnam POW camps. Yet again, Agamben’s notions of history are a bit shortsighted. Canticle, too, must deal with violence in its recapitulation of the Scientific Revolution. We shall, therefore, read “Fiat

Lux” as Miller’s attempt to systematize science and religion in his version of the 16th and 17th centuries and his success or failure in that attempt. Again, one finds both success and failure in the three distinct strands of this same time period—Miller’s version, that of the History of Science, and our own.

In Miller’s and the History of Science’s versions, one of course finds

systematization and the peaceful interaction of science and religion. These versions of history will become increasingly untenable, though, as we examine the supposed feedback provided by the Church.24 Unorthodoxy and heresy, according to Miller, are virtually non-existent concepts, because the monks of Leibowitz have always protected and even become scientists. Following the History of Science, these legal accusations were small challenges posed by the Church, again normally prior to the Scientific Revolution, which actually had a positive effect on science over time. Yet both Miller and the History of Science approach the Scientific Revolution by positing continuity, either between the flame deluge and the memorabilia or between Paris and Copernicus respectively. These ideas of continuity solidify the system into which they seek to place science and religion. At the same time, however, they do not allow for continuity

between Tertullian, Augustine and even Aquinas, as we already discovered, nor will they view the attitudes of the Scientific Revolution in the context of the stance of the Middle Ages Church toward heretics. Like Christian apologists, then, they only apply such terms as continuity when it suits their ends.

24

In fact, as Heaven raises the idea of a “sick” system, so we might extend this characterization to the systems discussed in the History of Science. Sickness, though, returns us to the notion of monstrosity and confounds the idea of peaceful systematization by bringing to light the exclusion apparent in such sick systems. Take, for example, the sickness motif of such techno-horror films as Night of the Living Dead or

Strangely enough, we shall more faithfully apply the term continuity to history in our own consideration of the Scientific Revolution, because we shall connect the ideas of unorthodoxy and heresy in the Middle Ages to the Church’s treatment of scientists in the Scientific Revolution. One might argue that in so doing, I am also creating a system. A system, I might reply, is not an inherently negative term when it accounts, as I shall and as many historians do not, for the violence enacted by each of its component parts. In the case of science and religion, one must account not only for the contribution of science to a history of violence, which any cultural critic stands ready to show, especially

concerning the nuclear age. The careful critic should also include the violence enacted in the name of religious institutions that are ultimately responsible for many of our society’s categories of exclusion. That is why in our consideration of “Fiat Lux” and the Scientific Revolution, we are going to return to “Fiat Homo” and to heresy/excommunication as we